Action in Carrefour

On July 24 there was a protest in a Carrefour supermarket in Warsaw against the humiliating treatment of workers imposed by tbe management. The protest was directly related to the introduction of the "red dot" system where employees have to stand on red dots in the middle of the crowded market to speak to their managers. It came out that workers even had to stand there if they wanted to take a toilet break.

Workers protested that this was ridiculous since sometimes that even had to wait 5-10 minutes for a supervisor to come and give them permission to leave their work station for a toilet break. This time to get permission is a lot longer than just going to the toilet, so it actually makes the break much longer. However, if an employee goes without permission, s/he could be fired. The workers feel this is done especially to discourage them from asking for breaks.

Read more!

May Day

And here is the rest of it.The Union of Syndicalists (ZSP) will celebrate May Day this year with the residents of Warsaw's Praga district who have been protesting against rent increases and the reprivatization of public housing for the last few months.

Hyde Park with Tenants / Residents

Prior to the May Day demonstration there will be a series of small Hyde Parks - in backyards, parks and other public places. ZSP calls on residents to resist the rent increases with protests, direct action and a rent strike. Instead of housing run by irresponsible and corrupt bureaucrats, we call on people to organize themselves and repair their decaying homes with their rent money instead.

In the middle of a major European capital city, there are buildings without central heating and hot water and even without water and toilets in each flat. This public housing has been devasted by years of neglect. The city is now raising rents 200-300% and many people cannot afford it. We call on people to organize neighbour associations to deal with these problems at the grassroots level and to fight against the eviction of tenants who cannot pay or who are being forced out of reprivatized housing.

The main Hyde Park will take place at 13:00.

May Day - Enough Anti-Social Policies! Everything under the control of workers and the community!

At 14:00 we will gather outside the last remaining public health care in the neighbourhood, Praski Hospital. It's future is uncertain as the government vows to commercialize everything. Expansion of the hospital was started but the government cut funds, leaving the hospital with debts. Now they want to merge it with another hospital on the other side of Warsaw. People are presented with only two visions of health care (and social services in general): either a corrupt and badly organized public system, or a privatized and commercialized one. We know that neither system is good since they both revolve around the people in control making money - whether this be a commercial firm or government / municipal institutions. We call for the health care system to come under worker and civic control, to be freely accessible for everyone and not to be based on the profit motive.

We solidarize with striking health care workers across the country. As instituions are "commericalizing", more and more workers are forced onto contracts, work is outsourced and public hospital space is rented to private facilities. Fewer and fewer medicines and medical treatments are refundable by the National Health Service and fewer public services are available. Patients bear the brunt of these anti-social policies, but so do workers, especially nurses who are grossly underpaid and whose work is clearly less valued by hospital administrations. In addition, recently some nurses were repressed for taking part in a strike in Lodz. We support the demands of health care workers for improvement of their working conditions. We are also particularly concerned about the Working Time Directive and the amount of hours health care workers are forced to work. Besides these long hours, many are forced to moonlight in order to make ends meet. Forcing medical staff to work 60, 70 or even more hours a week has a direct negative impact on health care services and safety and is a travesty of workers' rights.

123 years after the events around May Day in Chicago, we see that the struggle for the 8-hour working day is still extremely urgent.

After visiting the hospital, we will also stop at the Post Office. There we will talk about the restructuring and liberalization of the market and what that means for the workers. Another workplace which was restructured years ago was PKP, the Polish Railways, which is divided into some dozens of companies at present. There are serious labour disputes not only with railway workers, but with people who repair trains who have lost their contracts with PKP Cargo. We will hear about how corruption in the Railway companies screws the workers.

PKP Cargo, like many other firms, have used the crisis as an excuse to start mass layoffs and to negotiate worse work contracts under the threat of cutting jobs. We will speak about the effects of the crisis and analyse how it is related to capitalist practices and abuse.

We will pass by supermarkets Carrefour and Biedronka. Biedronka is particular will receive our attention. It is very cheap and many poor people shop there, but it is also infanous for violating workers' rights. We will talk about the economies of supermarkets and the high price of low prices.

Finally we will pass by the bazaar where many people are illegally working and say a few things about the exploitation of migrant workers.

The day will end with some relaxation in the beautiful Skaryszewski Park.

warsaw@zsp.net.pl Read more!

Supermarket Critical Mass

On June 7th, anarchists from the Union of Syndicalists and FA Praga, together with the family of one striking cashier, held the first Supermarket Critical Mass in Carrefour in support of supermarket workers who were holding a slow-down strike. --- Supermarket workers around Poland decided to announce a work slow-down to protest against having to work on holidays. (The strike fell on the occasion of the so-called "Corpus Christi", which is a state holiday in Poland.) The workers demand days off on all state holidays. With this strike, they were hoping to dissuade people from shopping on holidays by making it a hassle. --- Supermarket workers, often (but not always) poor, middle-aged women are among the most exploited in Poland. Compulsory overtime is normal in many markets, as well as having to perform other tasks, such as moving boxes; cashiers as complain about having to sit at the registers for long hours without any breaks at work which often results in repetitive motion injuries. Wages at the supermarkets are rock bottom, often 225 euros a month or less as many supermarket workers are employed "part time". Supermarket chains however tend to report record profits.

The idea of the action was to help to "slow things down" in the supermarket by creating a traffic jam by parading up and down the most narrow aisle - next to the cash registers. A group of shoppers, some in T-shirts that read "Stop Exploitation", took carts and went down the aisles in rows of two, stopping at almost every product to examine the ingredients, thus creating a bit of chaos. There was no trouble with security guards who immediately recognized this as an action in
support of the strike and asked the anarchists to bring them the same T-shirts.

The anarchists had originally planned on blocking the registers even more by bringing items without codes to the registers and playing other "tricks", but in fact there were so few people there in the supermarket that there were no people to slow down. So instead, each protestor bought a carrot, a grape and a potato each and headed to the counters where leaflets and newspapers were given out. The workers were happy that people supported the strike. Afterwards there was an
action with giving out leaflets in the mall where the supermarket was located explaining a little about the strike and the economics of supermarkets. Read more!